Nations of Song Aaron Corn Eye-witness testimony is the lowest form of evidence. — Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist1 Poets are almost always wrong about facts. That’s because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth. — William C. Faulkner, writer2 Whether we evoke them willingly or whether they manifest in our minds unannounced, songs travel with us constantly, and frequently hold for us fluid, negotiated meanings that would mystify their composers. This article explores the varying degrees to which song, and music more generally, is accepted as a medium capable of bearing fact. If, as Merleau-Ponty postulated,3 external cultural expressions are but artefacts of our inner perceptions, which media do we reify and canonise as evidential records of our history? Which media do we entrust with that elusive commodity, truth? Could it possibly be carried by a song? To illustrate this argument, I will draw on my 15 years of experience in working artistically and intellectually with the Yolŋu people of north-east Arnhem Land in Australia’s remote north, who are among the many Indigenous peoples whose sovereignty in Australia predates the British occupation of 1788.4 As owners of song and dance traditions that formally document their law and are performed to conduct legal processes, the Yolŋu case has been a focus of prolonged political contestation over such nations of song, and also raises salient questions about perceived relations between music and knowledge within the academy, where meaning and evidence are conventionally rendered in text. This article was originally presented as a keynote address to the joint meeting of the Musicological Society of Australia and the New Zealand Musicological Society at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, in December 2010. It was designed to be delivered as an integrated inter-media work in which spoken 1 deGrasse Tyson, Neil. 2008, ‘UFO Sightings’, Neil deGrasse Tyson. <http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/ tyson/watch/2008/06/19/ufo-sightings> accessed 1 February 2012. 2 Faulkner, William C. 1957, The Town, Random House, New York, p. 88. 3 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1964, The Primacy of Perception, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill., pp. 159–90. 4 All spellings of names and words from the Yolŋu languages follow the conventions used today throughout the Yolŋu communities of Arnhem Land (Zorc, R. David. 1996. Yolŋu-Matha Dictionary. Reprint. Batchelor, NT: Batchelor College). 145 Humanities Research Vol XIX . No . 3 . 2013 words, projected photographs, recorded songs and only minimal projected text came together to make a case for music as a palpable vehicle for meaning, and thus knowledge, which was simultaneously reasoned and poetic. Much like a song itself, it deployed emotive poetical devices and repeated hooks, over overtly technical exegesis, to shape audience understanding. Stephen Wild and Ruth Lee Martin invited me to redeliver this address for a new audience at One Common Thread, the International Council for Traditional Music Colloquium on Laments, at The Australian National University in Canberra in April 2011. Being largely concerned with the Yolŋu song tradition, Manikay, in which there is an intrinsic aesthetic of warwu (‘sorrow, grief, sadness, worry’),5 my original keynote resonated well with the theme of the lament as a shared human form of expression. This article therefore demonstrates how Manikay expresses and mediates sacred relationships between living humans, the deceased and their ancestral forebears. Yet it also serves as a lament of my own for the morbidly high attrition within Australia of Indigenous song and ceremonial traditions that have been lost to the world since the British occupation of 1788, and the continuing endangerment of those that survive to this day. Reflected in a Sound Imagine me reflected in a sound. There is a song in my mind that takes me to a place of great beauty and antiquity. As its melody undulates through my synapses, I can sense this place anew. I can feel the fine, white sands squelching between my toes, so soft and light it is like walking on a cloud. The sands whistle with the wind as it ripples across the bay, over the sandbars, and towards the adjacent island. The air tastes of salt, and, close to shore, a rip current emits a constant, gentle roar. In the brilliance of the sun silhouetted against an expansive white cloud, a lone gull cries out to her chicks nested on yonder island. With each beat of this song echoing somewhere between my ears, my footsteps take me from the water’s edge to climb a steep, sandy embankment into a leafy grove. I sit here under the wide, low branches of a tamarind tree, where I can survey the soft sands, the rip current, the sandbars and the island before me. Though I am far removed from the nearest city or town, other people surround me in this place—generation upon generation of them—and they watch me as I sit. I can see them paddling a canoe back to shore after a long day of hunting. My hunger piques as the aromas of roasting fish and boiling turtle eggs waft 5 Corn, Aaron 2009, Reflections and Voices: Exploring the music of Yothu Yindi with Mandawuy Yunupiŋu, Sydney University Press, Sydney, p. 11. 146 Nations of Song over from their campfires. Children do backflips on the beach and build designs in the sand. They each move in rhythm with the song, which somehow seems to carry their combined voices as well—one voice made of many intertwining threads. Slowly they come together and file onto the beach carrying a flag of deep blue. They dance with vigour, and embed it deep into the sand. As the flag ripples in the wind, they call me by name. I now dance with them amid these abundant environs and, with the song in my mind, my own voice blends into theirs. Though this is not quite right. Because it is not really my voice at all, but rather an amorphous yet familiar voice of the one made of many. Though I did once experience some of these things at a place I can recall having visited, this tableau is much more than a simple recollection. The remainder of what I describe here comes not from my own memories at all, but rather from the song itself—from the way that its lyrics, its melody, rhythms and form, and matching choreography reveal intimate details of place accrued through generation upon generation of dutifully curated knowledge. The song takes me to that beach as though I were standing there right now with the soft sands between my toes and all the other details I described. Yet now we face a dilemma. At this moment of realisation, I can offer no evidence whatsoever that any such thing is going on in my head—no proof of a song, or the place I say it describes. Even more spurious is the premise that, because of the song in my mind, I feel some kind of personal connection to this place and those who dwell there. I have no evidence at all. This is why I am fascinated by music—the common object of our studies— but particularly song: that combination of organised sounds particular to our species, which, in English, we call music and words. William S. Burroughs once described the word as a virus,6 yet song is perhaps the most viral of our cultural forms. By their very design, songs are both memorable and portable. They can slip into our psyches unawares and haunt us without warning. In infancy, they sing us to sleep. In childhood, they taunt us in the playground, and in adolescence and young adulthood, they express our desires and give release to our anxieties. Whether we evoke them willingly or whether they manifest in our minds unannounced, songs travel with us constantly, and just as they are so easily internalised, they are also easily personalised. At the crossroads of memory and fancy, in the twilight between experience and imagination, songs frequently hold for us fluid, negotiated meanings that would mystify their composers. On the teenage mix tape of the past and the digital playlist of the present, we freely assemble them at will as authentications of ourselves at particular times 6 Burroughs, William S. 1962, The Ticket That Exploded, Olympia, Paris, p. 49. 147 Humanities Research Vol XIX . No . 3 . 2013 and places, or into particular times and places, as fluid permutations of our sonic selves. At play here, there is also a constitutive social mechanism that takes us out of ourselves and lends us that fleeting sense of belonging to some intangible, greater whole. Our negotiated associations with these playlists to our lives enable us to identify and maintain bonds with others: with our kith and kin, with our communities and countrymen, with those who speak our language, and with our generational peers. The changing times of Bob Dylan7 and Band Aid’s bid to feed the world8 are now long gone. Yet it is worth remembering that more than once in human history, whether in the streets or via live simulcast, complete strangers have come together in the name of a good song. Public opinions and political persuasions can turn on these tides with startling alacrity, and usher in major social change. This is a remarkable phenomenon when you consider that our synaptic processes— the ones that enable us to sing silently in our minds—are so infinitesimal that they are all but imperceptible. Trivial though this may seem, take a moment to think about the multi-billion-dollar advertising industry that deploys all kinds of music, via all kinds of media, for the sole strategic purpose of swaying our feelings to influence our decisions.